Game developer cuts out the middle man, uploads its own game to The Pirate Bay

Video game piracy has been an issue for developers for decades. Virtually every game on the market will make its way on to a torrent site within days of its release (if not earlier), but in recent years, another far more legally ambiguous method of acquiring games has been just as big a problem.

As difficult of a time as game developers have had combating piracy, key resellers might be an even bigger thorn in the side of the industry at this point. For those of you who don’t know, a key reseller (of which G2A is the most popular) acquires game keys from regions where the game is cheaper or from third-party sellers and turns around and sells them at a significant discount to consumers.

This process might sound consumer-friendly, but publishers lose a ton of money when games are sold this way, and smaller publishers can be virtually wiped out if a sizable portion of the sales of their games come through resellers. So rather than let the resellers determine its fate, game developer Acid Wizard Studio opted to upload its new survival horror game Darkwood directly to The Pirate Bay.

Darkwood launched earlier this month on Steam to positive reviews, but since Steam allows users who have spent less than two hours with a game to receive a refund, there were inevitably some refunds of Darkwood. As a developer, Acid Wizard can see the reasons why a player would refund the game (if they provide one), and one player explained that “he needed the refund because he didn’t want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month.”

The developers were genuinely affected by the message, and so rather than simply gift that kid a copy of the game, they decided to simply upload the game straight to The Pirate Bay, effectively making it free for anyone who didn’t have the money to pay for it. They ask that anyone who downloads the game for free consider paying for it when it goes on sale, but plead with them not to buy from key resellers, which they say would be “feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”